Alas, what is Australia without some photos of its most iconic wildlife?
Every time I’ve been around the Adelaide area, I’ve made it a mission to go to one of the sanctuaries or parks to get up close with some of the classic Australian animals that I wouldn’t see otherwise. This year, I went with my family to the Cleland Wildlife Park, the centerpiece of an about 11 square-kilometer protected area in the Adelaide Hills surrounding the city. The Conservation Park, as the area is known as a whole, includes many hiking and biking trails as well as enclosures with famous Australian animals, but unfortunately I did not have enough time to go explore all of that. Perhaps another time…
What I did manage to get, however, were nice petting opportunities with a handful of very adorable marsupials.
These little peeps are Southern brown bandicoots, Isoodon obesulus, and they’re everywhere in the park. For their small size and shy appearance (they look somewhat like rats, except obviously much cuter), they’re surprisingly friendly, and will rarely object to petting, especially when distracted with a bit of food. I remember the first time I saw a bandicoot on a wildlife sanctuary, it was sprinting around crazily, and I pursued it in large circles trying to even identify what it was – yeah, these were considerably calmer.
Although they do look like rodents, bandicoots are marsupials, thus being more closely related to kangaroos and koalas than mice or rats. However, bandicoots have indeed adapted to fill the ecological niches that small rodents like shrews hold in Eurasia and North America – they live in small nests, eat bugs and plant roots, and are food for native owls and snakes. This species used to be found throughout much of the rainier parts of Australia (mostly along the coasts), but its range has since shrunk considerably due to predation by newly-introduced predators – namely cats and foxes. As bandicoots aren’t used to seeing these predators, they don’t know to avoid their scent or evade their hunting style, and so their numbers have declined precipitously. However, as evidenced by their presence in this park, the plight of the Southern brown bandicoot is now recognized, and people have begun to protect their isolated populations or reintroduce them to areas where cats and foxes can’t get to them. Oh, and before you ask, these bandicoots have NO relation to Crash Bandicoot – the videogame character is in fact an Eastern barred bandicoot, a species I have never seen before.
Of course, here are the obligatory kangaroo pictures. I’ve already mentioned them before in my post where I had pictures of wild ones, but now that I’m seeing them up close in the Wildlife Park, I can make a few more observations. First of all, the color difference between the red and Eastern gray kangaroos is quite obvious here. The size difference is unfortunately not – the red kangaroos can grow to be slightly larger, but I these individuals aren’t full grown. Another thing – kangaroos are unbelievably soft. Their fur feels like…uh, sort of like the really fuzzy inside of a jacket. Or like one of those pillows that you rub the wrong way and then it turns like a slightly darker shade of the same color. The ones that do that, kangaroos feel like that. Finally…it’s not exactly related to the topic at hand, but if you have a Google smart speaker or mini assistant (or whatever it’s called), ask it “how many legs does a kangaroo have?” You might be surprised to hear the answer.
This is a wallaby, and if you think it looks like a mini kangaroo, you’d be right! It pretty much is. Taxonomically, wallabies are grouped together with the kangaroos, but they are more diverse – different species of wallabies live in rainforests, the Outback, and in rocky terrain, and not all of them are endemic to Australia (a few species can be found in the nearby tropical New Guinea). I’m not sure exactly which species this one is, but my guess would be a type of rock wallaby. General observations (including experience from visiting other wildlife parks in the past) – the wallabies I’ve seen in parks generally seem to be friendlier with people than the kangaroos, and have better appetite for the park-provided kangaroo food. Being smaller, they’re also less dangerous if one happens to get irritated with you and gives you a kick or shove – if a full-grown kangaroo does balance on its tail and really kicks you in the chest, that could be game over (fortunately, the kangaroos in the parks are more used to people, and won’t do that unless you really hurt or bother them, such as by stepping on their tails).
Probably the only animal to rival the kangaroo in its renown as a symbol of Australia, Phascolarctos cinereus, better known as the koala. Lots of facts about these arboreal marsupials, but I’ll try not to bore you. Mostly native to the country’s eastern coast (Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria), koalas were hunted to extinction in South Australia in the early 1900s and were later reintroduced to this state . (The first time I went to Adelaide and around the Adelaide Hills, I saw a wild koala, part of this reintroduced population. Since then, I’ve only seen them in parks.) Thanks in no small part to their cute and cuddly appearance, making them perfect flagship species for conservation efforts, they are some of the best-protected marsupials and have made an amazing comeback in the 100 years since they were killed in the millions for their fur. They have since been thrown back into the delicate middle ground between healthy populations and endangered status, indicated by its classification as a “vulnerable” species on the IUCN Red List, due mainly to habitat loss and fragmentation and diseases resembling human STIs (namely Chlamydia and a virus called Koala Retrovirus that causes a similar disease to human AIDS). Fortunately, koalas continue to receive a lot of research and conservation help, including at parks such as this one which may take in abandoned, sick or injured individuals and nurse them back to health before releasing them again.
A quick note relating to koala cuddling or displays: not all parks are the same. Please do your research and make sure that the location where you go to see these adorable animals really does care for them and doesn’t simply use them as props for tourists. Cleland does a good job of putting the health of their koalas first – currently, in fact, koala experiences are canceled until mid-February due to a skin condition caused by high heat – but please make sure you read a little bit about the park you plan to visit online to get a sense for what the park’s priorities are or maybe even find special information about their koala-holding policies. (In addition, if you imagine holding a koala to be like an angel’s embrace or something else heavenly like that, no, it’s not at all like that. Their fur is really not that soft and they are surprisingly claw-y, so although it’s not painful, holding a koala is significantly less fun than holding a baby of the same weight.)
Although they look a bit like short-haired shiba inus, these are dingoes, one of the apex predators on the continent. Their taxonomic and conservation status are quite confusing because unlike the Australian marsupials that lived and evolved on the continent for millions of years, the dingo arrived only a few thousand years ago from New Guinea, and it is believed to have descended from once-domesticated breeds there. Therefore, dingoes aren’t truly their own species in the same sense that wolves and coyotes are, but at the same time they still live completely independently of humans. The most commonly accepted scientific name for them is thus Canis lupus dingo, making them a once- but currently non-domesticated subspecies of the gray wolf; at different points in history, however, they have been referred to as a feral breed of domesticated dog or even their own species. Of more controversial debate is what should be done about them; they are considered pests, as they may attack sheep and cattle, and they are believed to have caused the extinction of the Tasmanian devil and thylacine on mainland Australia. In fact, the world’s largest fence is built across southeastern Australia to keep these fertile lands free of dingoes and livestock in this area safe from their attacks. However, others argue that dingoes have since taken on or created a new niche in the Australian ecosystem, helping to control newly-introduced pest animals such as rabbits and deer.
This is the Cape Barren goose, known scientifically as Cereopsis novaehollandiae. It being…well, a goose, there isn’t a lot of special stuff I know about it. It’s native to the southern coast of Australia, and perhaps the most interesting thing about it (besides its patterning, especially on the beak) is the fact that this goose rarely swims – it mostly forages for grass on land, and in this park, it will aggressively chase people for offerings of kangaroo food pellets.
A far more unique and intimidating bird, this is the emu, Dromaius novaehollandiae. It’s the largest bird in Australia and the second-largest in the world (after the ostrich), and like the ostrich, New Zealand kiwi, and the cassowaries of northern Australia and New Guinea, it belongs to the group of flightless birds called the ratites.
They’re probably one of the scariest birds out there (barring the cassowaries, which I have never seen in person), which isn’t helped by their glaring red stare and habit of slowly following anyone who it sees has a bag of kangaroo food. My 8-year-old cousin shook her bag in front of one of these, and it proceeded to walk slowly towards her. She then shakily said with a laugh, “nice bird…nice…bird…ni-” as she started walking in circles around me, with this giant emu (taller than her, mind you) following her, staring daggers. Even after she threw some pellets on the ground, the emu wasn’t interested. Only after I took the bag from her did the emu finally give up on chasing her…and it promptly began to follow me. It only finally stopped after I tossed some pellets coincidentally in the direction of a broken bag of kangaroo food that was lying in the grass. The emu then walked over to there, bent down, and ate the paper bag.
Also (and I’m kicking myself that I never got this on video), the emus would make like this….really scary thumping sound inside their stomachs or something every now and then. I don’t know if it’s a territorial call, or if they were signaling their contempt or irritation towards visitors, but it sounded like a very low, loud burp that emanated from their body. Here’s a video on YouTube that sort of captures this sound (fortunately, the emus I saw were a lot calmer than this, although the drumming sound from any given individual did go on for a couple seconds, much longer than the filmed emus):
Unlike many other native Australian animals and now-extinct ratites such as the moa of New Zealand, the emus of the Australian mainland do not face any conservation threats (emu subspecies on Tasmania and other Australian islands went extinct soon after the arrival of Europeans). In fact, with the introduction of agriculture and irrigation to greater areas of the center of the continent, emus have been able to expand their range slightly. This, however, has placed emus in greater conflict with Australian people…which leads me to probably one of my favorite historical stories ever. During the Great Depression years in the US, Australia also suffered severe economic hardship, and many farmers were frustrated both with their inability to sell wheat and the arrival of emus, which ate, trampled and ruined their crop. At the continued protest of farmers in Western Australia, the Australian government finally sent artillery – some World War I-era machine guns – and soldiers to exterminate the emus once and for all in what became known as the Emu War. Commencing in early November of 1932, the soldiers attempted to kill the emus over a span of about a month. However, they faced weather problems which dispersed the emus, guns that jammed, and tactically-skilled enemies – the emus often adopted “guerrilla tactics”, splitting up from the huge herds in which they were first sighted into small groups and running away from enemy fire at high speeds. Eventually, the soldiers were recalled, and while no official declaration of war or surrender remains to document the Emu War, it is almost universally regarded to have been an Emu victory. The birds continued to destroy crops for a few years until better fencing was installed around peoples’ fields.
So there’s a small sampling of some of Australia’s most famous animals, up close and personal. My next couple of posts will deal with my journeys in a very different city. Stay tuned.
Algal Ramblings 